


The Right Thing I; What You Carry With You

by ShamanOfHedon



Series: The Right Thing [1]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-05
Updated: 2013-07-05
Packaged: 2017-12-17 18:33:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/870693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShamanOfHedon/pseuds/ShamanOfHedon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A short story connecting all five core Elder Scrolls games through a reluctant girl and the legacy her late mother and distant father left for her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Right Thing I; What You Carry With You

(Set in the world of Elder Scrolls)

Alastair sipped his brandy by the fireplace, well into the night, as he always did. His quiet secluded cottage was off any beaten path. He was content with that. It was a great deal easier for him to not dwell on past pains that way. Only three people knew of his cottage, let alone he himself, one of whom was now quite famously dead. The second would never come here, and the third was the courier who brought him supplies every fourth Morndas who knew nothing of who Alastair was.

As the next delivery was yet two weeks away, he was rather taken aback as the sound of the downpour outside was interrupted by an oddly hesitant knock.

"Begone," he shouted, not even looking up from the hearth. "I take no visitors here."

"Ocato sent me," said a woman's voice, young, but impossibly weary.

Alastair turned sharply toward the front door. Ocato was one of the three who knew of him. He quietly stood up, and opened the door. A young Breton, perhaps in her late twenties at most, stood drenched and shivering at his door. He pulled her indoors without a word, locking the door behind her. Still in silence he took her cloak and hung it by the hearth, pointing to a small unused guest bedroom as he handed her a dry robe.

When she had shed her armor and put the robe on, he gestured to the chair to his right, as he had already reclaimed his seat.

"So you are the vaunted Champion of Cyrodil my delivery boy rambles on ceaselessly about?" he asked, eyes not leaving the fire.

"That is..." she began hesitantly, "a title I neither chose nor like, but it is mine for better or worse yes. I see news travels even to the farthest forests of Hammerfell."

Alastair noticed an almost... palpable disgust as she said this. It was clear this girl had no love of fame, and disliked the idea of being hero worshiped. He looked over at her, sighing.

"Ocato said you could answer questions," she said, staring at the fire with eyes far older than her countenance. "Questions I had no freedom to ask anyone while the Oblivion Gates remained open."

"The Gates yes," Alastair replied. "Few could have done as you did. That kind of selfless courage is.... an inherited trait. From all Uriel and Ocato have sent me to read, you seem so very much like your mother."

"What do you know of my mother?" she asked, finally looking up at the weary old man.

"Well now," he replied, "is that not among the things you came to learn? Who you are? Where you came from? Why you were chosen to be what you are?"

The girl nodded. All she had asked Ocato was the reason she had awoken in a dungeon cell that fateful night, with no memory, to get dragged on a doomed man's escape and be thrust into such madness as that which followed. Ocato replied that such an answer required more answers after, answers he could not provide.

"Tell me girl," he began, "what do you know of the Jagger Tharn incident, or the Warp In The West? As far as both relate to our late Emperor?"

"Jagger Tharn," she began, "was the Emperor's Battlemage Supreme who trapped him in Oblivion, and the other incident involved a murdered king and a Dwemer golem of terrifying power. Beyond that, no more than the varied myth and rumour anyone else knows. Why?"

"Because that is where your answers begin," he replied. "Few but those closest to the Emperor and the girl who saved him then know what happened. Tharn had an apprentice in the royal court before he enacted his secret coupe. And she was a very clever girl that one. She figured out Tharn's deception and attempted to expose him. She found herself murdered for her valiance. In desperation, her spirit clung to our world, and sought out someone, anyone, who could help her before her spirit faded into the ether."

"What she found was a pale, emaciated, ragged thief in the Imperial prison's forgotten depths. This girl, not even an adult, had stolen bread to feed her mother, and was caught doing so. Anywhere else she'd spend a few days in the Watch's cells and be warned not to do it again, but she unfortunately stole it from the back of a carriage in which Tharn, in his guise as the Emperor, was riding. Furious that anyone would dare do such a thing to him, he had her thrown in the deepest, forgotten sections of the prison, this girl barely yet even begun to blossom, and expected her to die."

"Except she refused. Alone in ruined old depths of a dungeon no soldier dared enter, with no one to bring her food or talk to, surrounded by creatures in the dark that saw her as a meal, she survived. Against all odds she survived. For three long years. She fashioned crude but effective daggers from bones she found in the old cells. She drank water from the underground streams, and survived eating rats and moss. She killed any goblin that stumbled across her and thought to make a snack of her. But above all else, she survived, knowing her sick mother was likely dead without her care, and burning with hatred for the man she believed to be the Emperor."

"Tharn's dead apprentice found her, and told her the truth. She guided her free of the depths, and set her on the path to end Tharn. She traveled the whole of Tamriel, seeking the pieces of a broken artifact Tharn had shattered but been unable to destroy. An artifact that could stop him. And along the way helped so many people, simply because they needed the help and she could offer it, never accepting any reward other than the occasional meal. With the item restored, she revealed Tharn's duplicity, and killed him, freeing the Emperor."

"Uriel was eternally grateful to her upon his release from Oblivion. He ordained her as a Blade for her courage. She quickly became Uriel's most trusted and yet secret associate. She acted as a sort of unofficial Imperial Rogue, and often his right hand. When the king of Daggerfall was murdered, it was she he sent to find out the details, under the guise of checking on a missing courier. In the course of her investigation, again helping anyone in need she came across, much as you do, she uncovered a plot that threatened the Empire. Several interested parties were trying to gain control of a device that would animate the ancient Dwemer golem Numidium. Few understand the Warp in the West. I'm not sure even she did. But somehow she used the power of that device to twist reality, and several conflicting outcomes came to pass at once. The impossible act somehow ended up stabilizing the turbulent politics of Daggerfall, and once everyone was content and no longer actively working against the empire, she sent Numidium to be forgotten at the bottom of the sea and destroyed the control rod."

"And what does she have to do with me?" the girl asked.

"She was your mother," he replied. "I should think that much was obvious."

"I have no memory of my mother," she said. "Or for that matter of anything prior to the night the Emperor died 5 feet from me."

"You wouldn't," he replied, "even without the amnesia. She died giving birth to you. In accordance with Uriel's visions, which were never wrong, you were surrendered to be raised an orphan. You were adopted by a kindly Bosmer couple in Valenwood. And always watched. The Blades were under strict orders to never let you out of their sight, but yet to never interfere in your life nor let you know they were near. The Blades of course were not happy about this. They revered your mother and thought it wrong to just shunt you off like that. But the Emperor saw many things, and assured the angry confused Blades that their compatriot's daughter had a greater destiny ahead of her that they could not take part in."

"Please, explain?" she asked, now very curious.

"Another question for you first," he said. "What do you know of the Nerevarine?"

"The supposed reincarnation of a Dunmer warlord," she replied. "Six years ago, she appeared on Vvardenfell and somehow convinced the right people she was the prophesied Nerevarine. She killed a mad old false god living in Vvardenfell's volcano and freed Morrowind from his threat to use Numidium's twin construct to conquer the province before the Ghost Fence that held him in place gave out. She then killed Almalexia of the Tribunal who was now powerless and barely missed killing Vivec, who fled and left his people to wonder how they had so long worshiped pretenders. Why do you ask me of her?"

"Because you ARE her," he said, quite matter of factly. She gave him a look of utter disbelief, and thought to call him insane, but he saw the incredulity on her face and handed her a ring. She recognized it immediately, but knew not why.

"Moon-And-Star..." she whispered, turning it in her fingers. She looked up at Alastair, who nodded and looked at her left hand. She obeyed his unspoken request, and slipped it on her finger. It fit like skin, and her body shivered momentarily in recognition of a familiar feeling.

"Explain this!" she said, beginning to grow angry. "How is it I know this ring? If I am the Nerevarine why have I no memory of it? Why was I in that cell EXACTLY when Uriel would be using it to escape? And why does no one recognize me as the Nerevarine if I am indeed her? She's famed enough for townsfolk in Cyrodil to speak of her!"

"Because of the other ring," he said. "The one you can never seem to remember you're wearing."

She looked at her right hand and blinked. There was indeed a ring there. How had she never noticed it? A simple plain brass ring. She tried to take it off but couldn't find the will to pull it off her hand.

"Enchanted," she said.

"Yes," he replied, "for good reason. The Emperor knew that you would need to be in Cyrodil, and be anonymous to succeed. If anyone recognized the Nerevarine, the agents of the Mythic Dawn would be looking for you at every turn, far sooner than they did. Instead of trying to kill you in a futile, doomed to failure last ditch bid to salvage their plans, they'd have been hunting you from the moment you were seen at Weynon Priory, and you might never have so much as lived to set foot in Kvatch, let alone prove the gates could be stopped. And if you yourself knew your identity, it might have influenced your actions in ways that could have changed the outcome. You'd have wanted to go back to Vvardenfell to deal with the gates there first, and Cyrodil might have fallen to Mehrunes Dagon long before you could return, and Martin might have never been found. You needed a pure clean slate. That ring not only sealed your memory, but no one looking at you would see the Nerevarine. Their perceptions would be misdirected. They would believe themselves to be looking upon an average Breton girl."

"When you announced your intent to go to Akivar," he continued, "the Blades struck. You were drugged in your sleep on the ship you chartered. I slipped the ring on you while I visited Uriel at his request, and came home to wait for this night. I knew once all of Uriel's visions for you had come to pass, your nature would drive you to seek answers. And I knew Ocato would send you here to me."

The girl sat quietly for several minutes, twirling the story he offered over and over in her mind. She looked at him sternly.

"What happens now then?" she asked.

"What was always meant to," he replied. "I answer your questions, and I give you back your life."

He removed the brass band and waited quietly as all her memories flooded back, not only of the life before amnesia but of her first life so many centuries ago.

She sat there, quietly. She was contemplative and numb, her mind sifting and sorting and settling the restored memories. When everything in her mind was again as it should be, her eyes, already impossibly weary for one so young, took on the eerie sheen of one far older than she. She calmly turned those sad old tired eyes towards Alastair.

"Ocato wants to name me Empress," she said hesitantly. "The people of Cyrodil have been clamouring for it. I'm told it's being demanded in the rest of the provinces as well. Well, except in Summerset. They seem to believe they stopped the gates with their magic. Prickly lot those ones. Everywhere I turned, Ocano and his flock of chirping politicians followed me, pressuring me to accept for the good of the nation. I was only too happy to leave that pompous province to seek you out. I never wanted the insane hero-worship or unasked-for power I have in Vardenfell, and I do not wish it now."

"Who else is greater qualified?" Alastair asked. "Your mother saved Tamriel twice over, as have you. The people of Cyrodil and Morrowind love you. Once it becomes public knowledge who your mother was, and in turn who you truly are, all Tamriel will revere you. You could truly unite the provinces, and keep the peace. With Uriel dead, only someone as universally revered as the woman who saved the entire country from extinction could ever hope to keep the people united. Anyone else on the throne and political tensions might lead to civil wars and needless conflict."

"And if I wish no part in this nonsense?" she asked.

"Nerevar..." he began.

"Nerevar died centuries ago by his wife's hand!" she spat coldly. "I am the Nerevarine only because a meddling Daedra dropped a dead man's life in my head and declared it so. That life... I may remember his life but it is not my life. I am Marie. Just Marie. Nothing special, nothing more. And the good I do, I do for no fame or glory or power, I do it because it needs be done. Because people need help and no one else helps and I cannot stand to see people suffering or hurt. Nothing more, nothing less. I detest having authority over people. I want nothing to do with ruling. Find someone more suited to the task."

"More suited than Uriel's only daughter?" Alastair asked.

"Do you revel in revealing ever more improbable facts and coincidences?" she asked coldly, not believing him. In her gut she knew this was one step too far, and a ridiculous idea. "Were I his bastard daughter as was Martin his son, why not just send me straight to lighting the Dragon Fires? Why then could I not wear the amulet?"

"Akatosh is a sexist bastard," he replied, hoping to convince her of the lie for her own good. "Only male heirs may wear the Amulet of Kings. Beside that point is the fact that Uriel never knew. When you were born, he was told I was your father, because your mother knew of Uriel's prophetic dreams, and knew that if Uriel knew you were his flesh and blood, you would have been coddled and your destiny perverted."

"As opposed to being raped by his soldiers in a prison I was in for preventing the beating of an elderly woman and then shipped off to a wasteland to destroy an ancient lunatic," she said angrily. Sarcasm dripped from her voice "Why I must thank you truly for the life of comfort and boredom you spared me from."

"I am.... sorry..." he said sadly, "that you were violated so. It was not part of the plan to get you where you needed to be, although it does seem to have given you an edge which helped you survive your ordeals."

She sat silently for a very long time. He did not speak, giving her time to absorb everything, knowing that such a litany of revelations would drive lesser folk than she to madness. She stared at Moon-And-Star, and sighed. She knew she was not, could not be Uriel's daughter, but in her heart knew the rest was true. And she knew he was right, that if she refused the throne there was a risk that scheming politicians might tear Tamriel apart. She knew, with a heavy heart, what she had to do.

"I do the right thing," she said, tears running down her cheeks, "not to be praised, or to earn glory, or to obtain power. I do the right thing because someone must, and no one else wants to. I know not why I am thus driven, why my conscience never allows me to turn a blind eye. I am certainly not a good noble person. Every day I wish I could go somewhere like this cabin of yours, faraway, secluded, forgotten, and just live out my days alone, unbothered, never having to be anyone's blasted hero. I am compelled by some cursed instinct to help others."

"The desire to escape that instinct," he replied, "is due to the pain you have suffered all your life, the natural desire for that pain to cease. The instinct to do right is because you very much ARE a rare creature. No one does the good you do unless they choose to. You can easily choose to do nothing if truly you did not feel in your heart that you were doing good. Even if it hurts."

She slumped, and sighed.

"We had best go then," she said defeatedly. "Ocato was rather.... annoyed that I refused to be measured for a crown."

"You will be Empress then?" he asked.

"I do the right thing..." she mumbled, and as she always did, she buried her misery for the greater good.

Alastair was grateful she had believed his lie about Uriel being her father, or at least played along. The public believing a bloodline would ease her coronation. And she need never know that Alastair really was her father. He had long ago given up his rights to such a role. Besides, she would long outlive him. The one thing he would not tell her, the pain she would learn on her own after enough time had gone by without her dying again; Destroying the heart had granted her it's gifts. Azura's secret reward, or secret curse Already immune to any illness after contracting and curing herself of the Corprus disease, her shattering of the heart had made her immortal, and over time she would evolve, in ways even Uriel had not predicted. 

She began to suspect only twenty years later, when people began to give her the strange compliment that she looked so young for her age. At nigh fifty years old she still looked practically a waif. At first she dismissed it as the sort of empty flattery people are prone to offering their royalty. But as the days passed, she heard it more and more, and it began to sound less complimentary and more suspicious. There were rumours she had made a pact with a Daedra for her beauty. That was when she realized she wasn't aging.

Alastair did not seem surprised when she returned 25 years past their last meeting. He was elderly now, not far from his end.

"I must be a most frightfully stupid person" she spat, full of bitter hatred. "To have been lied to all my life and yet to have just let you lie to me even then."

"No," he replied. "Not stupid. Hopeful. No matter what you endure your instinct is still to hope for the best in everyone you meet."

"Such high praise from the father I never knew," she said coldly.

"How did you figure it out?" he asked, mildly surprised.

"I am the Empress," she replied. "When I realized I wasn't aging it occurred to me to start doing some digging. Ocato reluctantly handed over Uriel's journals. They explained my birth in great detail. How he viewed my mother as akin to a daughter and grieved her loss as if she were, how he regretted the order to send you away and rob me of a childhood. It never explicitly states you sired me, but I can read between the lines. He clearly felt he had deeply wronged you by sending me away. I can think of no other reason for him to have singled you out so amongst all the other Blades."

"And what will you do now? He asked.

"What I should have done in the first place," she replied, "before you convinced me to accept that filthy throne built on lies. I'm sure you'll hear all about it the next time your delivery boy comes. After all, news travels fast doesn't it?"

Alastair turned to her, his eyes wide with fear.

"What did you do?" he asked, his old voice cracking.

"What you made certain I never could," she replied. She pulled her cloak back over her face and left.

True to her threat, when his monthly delivery arrived three days later, his current delivery boy was gushing with the news.

The Empress was missing and presumed dead, after her carriage swerved off a bridge near Southpoint while on a royal visit to Valenwood Province. Her body was feared swept out to sea and lost, and her soldiers had given up the search. As per her instructions, the throne fell to her senior adviser, Arabus Mede, whose great great grandson Titus The Second would one day allow the Empire to crumble.

Alastair slumped. There was still one last unfulfilled prophecy of the Elder Scrolls, and without his daughter leading the Empire, she would be alone when it came to pass.

Marie knew it was soon going to be a detriment to Tamriel if she remained Empress. The longer she stayed put without aging, the less the people would trust her. All she could do was hope her replacement could keep the peace. She knew if she stayed, the fears of superstitious people would result in the very thing she became empress to prevent.

She had decided to attend to some long unfinished business. As she prepared to put her impending "death" into motion, she sent her blades on a discovery mission. One in which they succeeded. Once she had the information she sought, she set up the carriage accident, as far from the White-Gold tower as possible, so the Blades of Valenwood who were not as familiar with her eccentricities would not be able to spot the ruse as her personal Blade regiment in Cyrodil would likely have done.

Once she was sure the her death was believed to be fact, and had made her final visit to her absentee father, Marie Bandarhuul, quiet sombre Empress of Tamriel, Champion of Cyrodil, and the Nerevarine, left her life behind and sought to be forgotten.

The secluded home of another elderly man, on the Eastern coasts of Black Marsh, had a knock on it's door soon after. It was little more than a fishing shack. If anyone knew the truth about the elderly Dunmer hermit who lived there, the shack in it's tiny run-down humility would seem a cruel joke, a twist of poetic justice.

"Yes?" the old man called out to the visitor knocking at his door. "Who's there?"

Marie entered the shack and sat down quietly at the old man's dinner table. She removed her hood and looked him square in the eye. He gasped in shock.

"You..." he muttered.

"Me." she replied.

"Why?"

"Because," she answered, "you still owe me a debt of blood and honor Vivec."

"So your death was staged then." he said.

"Of course it was," she said. "We both know I can't die. It was the only way to escape that wretched life. Power such as that may be better used by those who do not crave it, like me, but it leaves a very sour taste in one's mouth when it was nothing they wanted."

"I had hoped I was free of you," Vivec replied.

"Don't be absurd," she said. "Given what is about to happen in Vvardenfell, you are a fool to think I had forgotten you."

"What do you mean?" he asked?"

"In your haste to flee from my wrath and end up as my dear misbegotten bride Almalexia? You doomed Morrowind."

"I don't understand?" he said, genuinely confused.

"Don't you?" she said, twirling a dagger in her fingers. "After I destroyed the Heart your power didn't immediately fade. Had you thought about anyone but yourself, you might have held off your escape long enough to move the Ministry of Truth, to safely set it down somewhere, where it could do no harm. Instead you left it floating there, in the sky above your city, a death sentence to the fools who still adored you. I have spent 25 years now trying to find a way to prevent was is coming and I cannot. I tried to convince the people of Morrowind to evacuate, but they refused. So many still believed you were their god, they refused to believe in the danger."

"What danger?" Vivec asked, trembling.

"Without you there at full power to maintain the enchantment?" she answered. "Any day now, the Ministry will stop floating, and a 500 ton chunk of stone will plummet into your city. And an impact of that magnitude will shake Red Mountain, and set off an eruption that Dagoth Ur and the Heart are no longer there to prevent. Your cowardice doomed Morrowind."

"I...." Vivec began to stutter.

"You? You die." she said, suddenly and swiftly thrusting the dagger through his neck. "Not for betraying the man whose memories Azura burdened me with. But for betraying your own people to your cowardice."

She left him dead, and began to make her way to Morrowind. As discreetly as she could she would try to save as many people as possible. A week later the city of Vivec was destroyed as she had predicted, and Red Mountain erupted. She did what she could, saved as many lives as possible, and then disappeared.

For four centuries, she wandered. Always careful to never stay in any one place long enough to be seen not aging. Collecting scars and losing an eye in the various fights she was drawn into. Anonymously helping people in need when she found those in distress, killing any Thalmor she encountered persecuting Talos Worshipers when that blasted war erupted, though she mostly tried to stay out of it.

Then one day, she found herself standing beside the wrong man at the wrong time while crossing into Skyrim, and she was arrested. She knew the executioners axe would hurt her, but could not kill her, and when that happened, the paranoid fears of superstitious people would brand her a witch or a Daedra, and her carefree vagabond life of obscurity would be ruined.

She was half right.

All hell broke loose when her execution was interrupted by a creature that should not have even existed. And in helping one of her would-be executioners escape, found herself dragged into service to others. Reluctantly, because her instinct to do the right thing never faded, she agreed to deliver a message to Whiterun, and in turn to help the Jarl's men slay one of these impossible creatures of myth. And slay it she did. And that was when the final cruelty of the life Uriel and Alastair had tried to doom her to reared it's ugly head.

For when, dripping with blood and exhausted, she found herself swallowing the dead dragon's soul in a flood of light and aura, blinking in disbelief as the survivors of the hunting party she had fought the beast with stood around her whispering in hushed awe, tears began to flow from her eyes. She remembered being asked to drink a red liquid at her coronation. With a sick throb in her gut, she realized it was blood. Uriel's blood. Collected and saved to take advantage of her secret immortality. Uriel's last "gift". The blood had adapted to her body, and her body to the blood. Without ever knowing it, she became Uriel's daughter after all. 

And when the sky itself opened up and bellowed an ancient word that she somehow knew was directed at her, all she could do was fall to her knees and scream to the heavens at the top of her lungs in pure unadulterated rage, as the soldiers from Whiterun stepped back, both in awe of, and at the same time terrified of her.

When she finally calmed herself, still crying, she turned to Irileth, the Dunmer woman who had lead the hunting party.

"Are.... you alright?" Irileth asked, finding herself genuinely surprised to see someone react to discovering such power with such rage.

"I haven't been alright since before you were born," she replied as Irileth helped her to her feet, a soft rain washing them both clean of the blood from the battle. Irileth was about to scoff at the idea a mere Breton could be older than a 200 year old Dunmer woman, but for the first time since meeting her earlier that day, she looked Marie directly in the eye, and what she saw in those eyes removed all doubt.

"We should go and tell the Jarl of what just happened," Irileth said, wary of the impossibly ancient Breton and yet knowing she was perfectly safe in her presence.

"Yes," Marie replied, "I suppose we should. Though first I must ask you... that word... the word that bellowed from the sky at me like thunder.... what did it mean?"

"As best as I have gleaned," Irileth replied, "from the warbling songs of old drunken Nords, there is a popular legend in Skyrim of a man who could eat the souls of Dragons and rend flesh with the words of the Dragon tongue. That man, or apparently woman, was called Dovahkin. It means Dragonborn. And this person was destined to save Tamriel from it's destruction at the hands of Alduin when he returns to destroy the world."

Marie sighed, and looked up at the sky again, then down at the old tarnished ring on her left hand, Moon And Star. 

"I do the right thing..." she said sadly, and set off back to Whiterun, to once again face a destiny she never wanted.


End file.
